Studio Notes · July 2024
Selinunte - Ruins, a photograph by Giovanni Crupi, dating from the 1880s or 1890s.
A Stone’s Life
In those moments when the mind is stuck on one thing or racing around amongst a million things, I recommend anthropologist Tim Ingold’s essays in his book Correspondence. He explores new ways of getting to know the non-human world and thinks about how things unlike each other can forge a relationship.
Ingold characterizes interaction as two parties facing each other with fixed identities, willing to shift in place but not transform their way. In contrast, when in correspondence, entities are moving along and changing through time. They simultaneously join together AND differentiate themselves.
So where to begin if we want to enter into a correspondence with one another? Below is an excerpt I’d like to share from Ingold’s long-form POV, giving voice to a stone as a means to truly get to know it.
“I am the resurrection of life’s old bones, born into another. I am of the flesh of my mother, the gestating earth and of the seed of my father, the ancient sea. I was delivered in a quarry. It was not an easy birth; they had to hack me out. There were men - many men - who came with metal tools…
I found myself among many of my kind, of similar size and shape. Using hoists, the men were piling them one upon the other to form massive, rounded columns…At last I found myself laid atop another like myself, high up in the air. The hot rays of the sun, the swirling winds: these were new to me. Was this what it means to live?
Perhaps one day, the warming created by all those cement furnaces, and the fossil fuels they burn, will cause the ocean levels to rise, and I’ll find myself back where I started, beneath the waves. Gradually, I will be covered by the detritus of the sea and will end my days as a fossil, not raised in the air but buried deep in the earth, stone within stone. Finally, I will have found my way home.”
Bits and pieces of ongoing wool work.
Benefits of Wool.
A friend recently questioned why I include wool in my work. Following Ingold’s cue on reframing our relationship to the more-than-human world, I wondered what the material would say about working with me.
In a past life, I was alive, dirty, greasy, and thick on a warm body. Or so I am told. How much do I really know about my fleece era or what happened to me after I was shorn, scoured, straightened, combed, spun, and dyed? I said I was alive, not meaning that I’m dead now. But I do exist on a different plane, as they say. I feel some innate draw back to that warm body (my home?) but I also know I’m never going back.
I do not not love being boxed in. I am pleased when human hands lift me up and feel my ambiguous weight. No matter how voluminous I may look, I know I always offer up a delightful surprise with my featheriness. Barely there but tingling with each touch.
The ordeal outside of the box is wild. First the hands swiftly pull my fibers apart. It can look like I’m being poorly treated from the outside, but I am actually built for this - it is like a good stretch after a long night of stasis. Then I endure the increasing heat of vigorous friction under warm water and soap, or remain dry and get pricked a million times with a fast moving needle.
After much human labor, (“I have no time to rush.”) I can rediscover myself as thick parallel lines woven together or a taut, felted surface. I envision a future where I am both silky and vibrant like a gem stone or I can see myself as varied and textured as volcanic rock. I can be smooth to the touch or just prickly enough to be divisive in a crowd. I can be a “rule-follower” coursing along straight lines or remain fluid-like and wild and lush. I am delicate but cannot be broken.
A morning walk in Ayvalık.
FROM THE HEART
Anima Mundi.
I am getting ready to go to Turkey next week. After spending some days in Istanbul with dear friends, we’ll head down to the western coast on the Aegean Sea to be with family. As part of this annual trip, a solo morning walk in the ancient seaside town of Ayvalık has become a personal tradition.
I admit my memory of past walks is unreliable as far as the specific itinerary, but I have a distinct sense of how they felt - itinerant.
It’s barely 9am and the heat is already taunting me. Shops are getting ready for the day by watering the cobblestones outside and cooling the street off. I am wearing sandals so the dirty-ish street water spatters my feet, ankles, calves. I keep moving. I maybe have a total of 50 minutes. They are waiting for me at home. The heat is expanding.
Old houses are older. New construction is invasive. All of it together is both comforting and offends a sense of orderliness. I think about the plumbing in these old bones. Oh the centuries old systems working hard underground, above ground, inside, outside. I take a lot of photos of doors: gorgeous, kitschy, broken, grand, tall, hefty doors. I keep skipping from shade to shade.
Every year I wander through these streets, I get a little lost, both physically and metaphysically. Carrying a non-smart phone, my navigational devices are the the sun I’m avoiding, the sea I can’t quite smell, and the echoing sounds of people on busier streets. I am deep in so much old life and so much new life. It feels like my body is being pushed through something dense rather than my feet taking steps on a surface. Is this what being in correspondence with an ancient place may feel like? Everything has a heart and soul. Everything is alive. And everything dies.
Until next month, hoşçakalın!